There are people who reason: when I shower stone cold, my body has to work to fight the cold. And that you become less heavy this way.
dr. Mariette Boon , doctor-researcher at the Leiden University Medical Center, tells Humo that our bodies are equipped with good systems to keep us warm.
She explains that you have roughly two different types of fat in your body.
‘The white fat stores energy.’ This is also the type of fat that accumulates between your organs and on your stomach and buttocks.
‘The brown fat works differently, says Boon. ‘Funnily enough, brown fat actually burns fats. You could see it as a body heat heater. We consider that brown fat as our good fat.
‘Special energy factories are turned on in the cells of the brown fat, which we call the mitochondria. Those mitochondria burn small fat droplets and convert them into heat.’ But: at some point the stock is empty. Boon: ‘Then something very clever happens. The brown fat then removes fats from the blood. Those fats don’t just wander around there, but come from the white fat. The brown fat then, as it were, absorbs the fats you want to get rid of.’ According to Boon, you can activate your brown fat by regularly seeking out the cold. ‘The extent to which a cold shower turns on your brown fat has not yet been scientifically researched. It is plausible, since cold has a very fast and strong effect on brown fat.’
If you hope tonight in the shower even a few kilos too bad news for you. ‘You probably won’t lose weight from two minutes of cold showers. You have to seek out the cold for a long time. So you shouldn’t see brown fat as the holy grail, but every little bit helps when it comes to reducing your (bad) fat.’
